The US in Peril
By Carlos Alberto Montaner
The trilogy is made up of Fear, Rage, and Peril. It’s about Donald Trump. The last in the series is Peril. It is a formidable work by Bob Woodward – the incisive writer who cost President Richard Nixon his job after unraveling, along with Carl Bernstein, the mess of “Watergate” – and Robert Costa, a young and notable Washington Post journalist.
Clearly, the book is “investigative journalism,” a specialty of Anglo-American culture. It costs publishers a lot of money to support journalists while they write a whole book. That’s why it belongs to the economically powerful Anglo-American culture. It takes a long time to interview 200 people and record their answers with their consent.
Then the interviews have to be transcribed, a task that, generally, is done by the authors themselves so as not to separate from the material for security reasons, edit them without betraying the essence of what has been said, and build a consistent story with them. In the case of Peril, Woodward and Costa brought to life 72 chapters, which can be read very quickly, and which convince any objective reader that Donald Trump was a danger to American democracy.
Why he was (and is) a danger? Because, once he found out that he had lost the elections, he tried to reverse the very clear electoral result, claiming that he was the victim of a large-scale fraud, insensibly destroying the image of the United States.
Why would anyone follow the American example, if the occupant of the White House is the product of a scam and must not be in that position? If it were true that Joe Biden’s presidency is the product of massive fraud, those engaged in the insurrection of January 6, 2021 would be heroes and not vulgar invaders of the Capitol.
It’s not about the quality of the intentions that Biden or Trump had, but the procedure to be selected. Democracy is based on majority rule. That majority may refer to the strange Electoral College (in the 2016 election, Trump got 304 votes compared to 227 for Hillary Clinton, which made him President, despite the fact that Hillary led him by almost three million votes in the popular election).
If in the 2020 elections Mr. Biden intended to raise taxes and unleash an inflationary process through increased public spending, or if it became evident that Ukraine was seeking to create a non-sancta relationship with the White House by paying thousands of dollars a month to the lawyer and lobbyist Hunter Biden, the son of the president-elect, is another story, much less important and serious than delegitimizing the electoral process through a ridiculous accusation that, surprisingly, more than half of the Republican party affiliates have believed.
Does Donald Trump himself believe it? Do Republican representatives and senators believe it, despite the fact that they are elected in the same elections classified as “fraudulent”? My impression is that any moderately informed person, especially Republican leaders, does not believe these irresponsible accusations. Those who count the ballots do not believe that there is an iota of truth in these reckless claims. The federal or state authorities that regulate and monitor electoral processes, either. The judges, among whom there are many Republicans, rejected in court just over 60 allegations as unfounded.
Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel Prize in Literature, assumes that Latin Americans choose their rulers poorly. In fact, they make extremely bad choices. Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly for Hugo Chávez. The Mexicans gave their hearts to Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Juan Domingo Perón never got less than 56% of the votes. I remember the polls, at the beginning of the revolution (myself among them, at 15 years old) when 91% of Cubans supported Fidel Castro, a far cry from the 9% that today approves the revolutionary process.
But it’s the same the world over. Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were chosen by the cultivated Europeans. Anything can happen when the right circumstances are present. Psychology Dr. Mary L. Trump affirms that her uncle Donald Trump is a sociopath. The only thing that really interests him is to be loved and admired by everyone, she wrote in “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” This is how Woodward and Costa describe him: an extraordinarily dangerous being.
